The most interesting case

The blog topic of the week for last week (I'm a little behind!) was "What has been the most interesting case you have seen?"
I worked in a Banfield, which is a general practice, so I haven't seen a whole lot that was absolutely amazing or super rare but there's been a handful of things that I just thought were cool to be a part of in general.
About a year ago, we had an ADR ferret come in and the husbandry wasn't exactly up to par so our DVM assumed it was hypoglycemia. Apparently, this is something that's pretty common in ferrets, as well as adrenal tumors. So, what do you do to confirm hypoglycemia? A spot glucose! Let me be the first to say that I'm not a huge fan of ferrets. They're essentially a cross between two animals you don't want to piss off: a cat, and a snake. Anyway, I ended up holding this ferret so the other VA could poke his ear, just like we do to cats, and get a drop of blood for our glucometer. Unfortunately, he just couldn't get blood. Okay, so... try a saphenous stick? Nope, that didn't work either. Right, go for the jugular. Nope. We weren't really sure how viable it was to go for either of those on a ferret, but the DVM told us that we should be able to get blood that way. The other VA and I ended up switching, and at this point in time, I wasn't super confident in my blood draw skills, let alone on a ferret. So, I held off, I palpated, and boom! I actually managed to draw blood from the jugular of a ferret. Definitely made me feel good.
Another time, just because I like ortho, we had this 1 yr old MN pitbull come in. He was super cute, his owners had put a little bow tie on him, and he was just the happiest guy ever. He'd been limping for about four months and by the time the owners brought him in, he was three-legged lame. The doctor couldn't find anything on physical exam because there was so much effusion and everything was just blown up. So, to rads we go! As soon as we took the first VD, we could see that he had medial patellar luxation gd 4/4 that had likely caused what looked to be a cranial cruciate tear. It was really cool to me to be able to actually see that on radiographs and recognize it, as well as the fact that it was pretty rare for a big and young guy like this to have that kind of a problem.
One of the most recent cool things I saw had to do with a snake, that, just like the ferret, had some husbandry issues. The owner had fed it a mouse that was a little too big and it essentially didn't break down appropriately. The snake had pushed and pushed to defecate the remains of the mouse and had ended up prolapsing its rectum. The doctor tried to push it back in a couple times but as soon as the snaked moved, it popped back out. So, I ended up being able to give injections to the snake (definitely a weird thing to do!) and she did a pursestring suture to keep the rectum in.
The last thing, that kind of tips the scales, although I wasn't directly involved, was Joe. Joe was a dog rescued by Save A Life in Orlando. Joe had been used as a bait dog before being rescued and his injuries were pretty extensive. One of the doctors I worked with performed several skin grafts to help close Joe's multiple wounds and he ended up being a live-in patient for a few months. Joe still limps, and he had a surgery to repair his patellar luxation as well, but it was amazing to see not only the turn around this dog made but also just how happy he was. He was always genuinely happy to see us come in, in the morning and he loved to run around the hospital at night as we closed. He went to a great family who takes very good care of him. The really amazing thing was the outpouring of support from not just the community, but even people overseas. Joe's story went viral and they raised a lot of money that just kept coming in. Joe's story can be found here. I didn't include the pictures, just because some of them can be considered pretty graphic.
I have a lot of time left in the profession, so I'm sure I'll see some other cool stuff too!